What was life like as a regular employee, when you were young?

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CitizenChatt@reddit

Yeah, WFH sucks. We went to the office. Worked hard. Left the office and met up with co-workers and partied harder. Good times. No fuss.

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I had those issues in my 20s and 30s, and I was always working 2 jobs. Then everything got better in my 40s. Then I got laid off at age 55 and am back to really struggling. I couldn't get a job in my field after 8 months and had to make a lateral step to a business job making 35k less. I really, really, REALLY want to retire at age 65 or 66, and I was on track until this latest round of layoffs. If I don't get back on track within 2 years, I definitely have to work into my 70s. I had to sell my house at a loss before COVID, and moved in with boyfriend, so I don't have much to show for all my years of work. The thing is I've been dirt, dirt, dirt poor and homeless before, so I know I can survive and find ways to be happy. I read a lot at the library. I only worry about pain. Like, if I got a painful medical issue and couldn't get treated for it.

Anyway, hitting rock bottom does change what makes a person panic. The best thing is to not worry. I don't mean not do anything about your situation, just don't spend your non-action time worrying, as that will affect what you do in your action time. Make a list of what You can do daily to improve your situation, mindlessly do those tasks, check them off, and on your down time get in nature.

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SillyDistractions@reddit

The first company I worked for in the early 1990s did not have HR. Most companies didn’t. People still smoked in offices, cursed, told inappropriate jokes, screamed at each other, asked illegal questions in interviews, you name it. But there were friendships, happy hour get togethers after work, you had people at work you could confide in, trust, rely on.

The young people who work in my office today don’t even look at each other. There is no camaraderie. They take “the people you work with aren’t your friends” very seriously. Okay fine. We’re not friends, but we spend 8 hours a day 10 feet away from each other every day, saying, “Hey, how’s it going?” isn’t going to hurt you.

You can see they’re stressed and anxious. They wear it like a banner.

I’d mentor, but I’m past that phase in my life. I just don’t care anymore. We spent the last 30 years being lied to, gaslit, manipulated, taken advantage of, then having our roles erode and then forced to train our replacements. And now we have AI to compete with. We’re done. It’s a countdown to retirement at this point.

Good luck. It doesn’t look like it’s going to get better.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

This is a really great perspective to read. The gaslighting, manipulation, and trust erosion in the workplace is generally why I don't make friends at work anymore. I used to, right out of college, but it's burned me one too many times. Maybe because us millennials are all so desperate and anxious, we also seem to take advantage of each other. My coworker "friends" have: - spread rumors to get me fired after sharing personal details with them - tried to drop a cat on my porch because they were too overwhelmed to deal with it - agreed to help me move and then ghosted - agreed to meet for coffee and then ghosted - agreed to cover a shift and then ghosted

I have about three coworkers who are willing to share themselves, and all three of them are women who only want to talk about their kids.

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CheekyMonkey678@reddit

Yes, it was like this even 40 years ago. No job security, abusive bosses, no respect of personal time or boundaries, insufficient pay and long hours. It damaged my health and almost killed me.

I left corporate when I was 35 and started my own business. Also long hours, no vacation, financial insecurity. Different types of stress, but in my opinion more manageable because I had more control and could make decisions to change things when it made sense to do so.

Life is very hard. Harder than it should be.

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data_meditation@reddit

My first, serious professional job out of school, I worked 70 to 100 hours/week (I worked long hours for 20 years), no vacation for the first 10 years, and was constantly insecure. It is normal to feel anxiety. All my work friends share similar stories. You are trying to find your place, and you will.

Take a deep breath and take one day, one moment at a time. This shall pass. You'll do great.

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Azerafael@reddit

When i first started looking for a real job at 22, i sent out 116 letters. Yes, that's the exact number i remembered because i couldn't believe i sent out that many.

In the end, a friend of my dad's offered me a very low level intern job with below minimal wage, and only for a year. I managed to find another job within that year and have since moved on.

To answer your question, yes, 24/7 anxiety. I lived on coffee and alcohol. For 35+yrs my daily commute would be 45mins or more, one way. This meant i had to be up by 5am so i can be out of the apartment by 6.30 so i can make it into the office before 8am. Why ? Because the boss (at every single company) "suggested" that it would be better if all staff starts their work day by 8am instead of 9am.

The threat of being fired is always real. They may not officially fire you but they will overload you with work so that if you don't leave voluntarily, then they can let you go due to a bad performance review.

I did what the boss told me to do, even if it meant working 3-4 days straight without sleep. I've seen people get fired and sued not because they made a horrible mistake, but because management needed a sacrificial lamb and its always the guy on the bottom of the ladder.

My only advice for you is to learn the most important rule of a career, ie "CYA" meaning Cover Your Ass. The reason for this is not just to avoid being fired but to have ammo just in case you end up being the sacrifice that the company "has" to make.

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lubbockin@reddit

round here in the 80s we used to have job adverts in shop windows and newspapers etc, these days all the starter jobs for youngsters seem to taken by 30plus aged foreigners .

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ofthrees@reddit

it wasn't like this before. there was always anxiety about getting the next job, but it was more like 'maybe this will take a few weeks.' it wasn't like it is now, where "i'll never be able to provide for myself, much less a family" was a legitimate concern.

my son is exactly your age, and i hate to tell you, your concerns are abysmally valid. i know of kids your age with multiple degrees who are competing with me for a career that only requires a high school diploma - and none of us are getting hired.

your generation and down have been really screwed, in my opinon. i wish i could offer more than commiseration.

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Helleboredom@reddit

I didn’t get my first “real job” until 2007 (was a little late to the party due to getting started on college late due to parents drug addiction and legal troubles- was a retail/restaurant worker from like 1994 until getting a degree). The next year, 2008, the economy collapsed and they fired most of my coworkers. I worked at least 60 hours a week for many years after that… but I gotta say I have never felt anxious at work. It’s like, I do the best I can and if that’s not good enough then fuck it. But thankfully I’m smart and have good necessarily skills and most people tend to like my no-bullshit attitude. I don’t feel like my job does any good in the world and that’s fine, it pays well. Now I’m almost 50, I work at a different company, a lot less stress, I actually like what I do. I have actually had fun at all of my jobs, including night shift at a convenience store back in the day.

I think it’s the internet/phones ruining things for you all young people. They do something to our minds, especially young minds, that makes everyone anxious and stressed. You never get a moment of quiet boredom because the internet is filling up all of that time. I think the mind probably needs quiet boredom.

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BigBanyak22@reddit

I graduated with my degree at the tail end of the 90s recession. There was no work to be had, I even begged to work for free just so I could get experience. I had no offers. It was not easy.

How does a GenX manage stress and anxiety better? It didn't exist when we were young. We just had to cope and not talk about it. Because it didn't exist and no one cared. So we've learned to manage high levels of what the young people call "stress" and "feelings" and "emotions". We didn't get to express ourselves.

That's not a good thing, we didn't get the balance that exists today.

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kat2211@reddit

How does a GenX manage stress and anxiety better? It didn't exist when we were young. We just had to cope and not talk about it. Because it didn't exist and no one cared. So we've learned to manage high levels of what the young people call "stress" and "feelings" and "emotions". We didn't get to express ourselves.

I don't understand comments like this. We talked about it all the time. We bitched and we moaned and then we got down to drinking and partying and having fun in the little bit of free time we had.

What we didn't have is some romanticized, sanitized idea of what work is supposed to be. We didn't talk about bringing our whole selves to work or creating safe spaces or even about the concept of work-life balance. Work was shitty and boring and unglamorous, and you lived for your off-hours.

OP - first of all, if it's actually true you don't have a "spare second" to eat in a day ,or can't go to the bathroom until 8 pm, you need to see an attorney because something isn't right. But to be honest, that sounds a little unlikely, particularly with a work from home job. In any event, I get what you're feeling in terms of the worrying and anxiety - I used to work in the legal field and had some incredibly nasty bosses (also had some great ones, though). The only solution I ever found that worked was just to stop caring. Realizing that the worst they could do was fire me, and just get comfortable with that. Have a back up plan. Do whatever you need to do to get a little financial cushion. Figure out if worse comes to worse, can you stay with your parents? Friends? Other relatives? Once you get things set up so you know your life isn't going to end if you lose your job, they have a lot less power over you, and it makes it a lot easier to stand up for yourself.

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BigBanyak22@reddit

Interesting... We bitched about work, but not about stress. No one cared about your stress or feelings... But our work was passion driven and glorious, heck I once spent three days and nights at work without going home... We lived to design and inspire people. Now I don't really care.

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doodlep@reddit

OP has time to post on Reddit so….

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TXtogo@reddit

I feel like I never had job security but I didn’t worry about it. Clearly I was irresponsible (I really was) but I was pretty carefree about that, like I never had money to live without my job but I also didn’t care - I just assumed I’d figure it out.

I think that’s the moral of the story, I always felt ok betting on myself and that regardless of external things I’d land on my feet. I had that confidence, but I also had the competence to take on challenges so I just went about things like that. Growing up poor brought me some perspective, I always knew how to “live skinny” while I figured it out.

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No_Button_1750@reddit

As the youngest of GenX at 46 I can say the answer to your question was no. Did I have trouble finding work? Not more than I’d expect to (I didn’t expect everyone would hire me and I was grateful when someone did).

Based on what you’ve described I would say it is very US specific. As a non-American who lives in America what I have observed since living here seems quite insane in terms of number of applications, rate of success, ridiculous belief in excessive college education translating to securing a job.

In your situation I would genuinely consider moving abroad. Part of what I have concluded about the US job market is the pure amount of people competing makes the whole process pretty depressing and the odds are not in your favour.

For context at 30 I left the military and moved into the public sector using my military training and experience then at 35 I moved countries (from New Zealand to Australia) to be a contractor to the public service. I moved from a country of about five million people to one of 27 million. It felt like the job opportunities were exponentially more just because I was in a country with a population five times the size of my home country.

In your case I’d try the opposite. Size of the market is working against you in the US so make a list of places you’d consider moving to and research options based on your age and the immigration opportunities. Europe, Asia, Australia, hell even New Zealand if you like being a long way from everything lol. You’re still young and have options from an immigration perspective.

Don’t feed your anxiety and believe you’re a victim. Take control of what you can and make a plan and a path to change your situation.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

Genuinely wonderful advice, thank you

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No_Button_1750@reddit

😊 trust me when I say you’ve got this.

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Ill-Speed-729@reddit

So, first job out of college...store manager. Easily was an 8-10 hour day, sometimes you'd have to do a double which meant opening AND closing the store. So pretty much on your feet for 12 hours the store was open and then 30 mins to open and close, a 13 hour day. I was 21 yrs old...did it for 4 years and got an office job as an assistant buyer. Needed to be in the office for 8am (had a 60 minute commute each way), routinely worked til 6p again with the commute a 12 hour day, at least I got to sit a little more? Transferred to Marketing, again 10-12 hour days were the norm. Now still in Marketing working for a remote agency, 20+ years into my career and still doing a 8-10 hour day, I save time because of my lack of commute...but work is time consuming 🤣

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rickthegoon@reddit

I’ll take the ball on this one. First day on the job at the fire dept. There are 14 of us entering the job on the same day and we are at the headquarters for our orientation and before figuring out where in the city we’ll be dispatched. In the first hour, the fire department director told us that if it was up to him, he wouldn’t have hired any of us.

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nectarinetree@reddit

For me, it was pretty much like the TV show, "The Office". That show was just a LITTLE bit too true to real life, especially the earlier seasons!

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sunshinelively@reddit

I got my first BA level real Job in 1989. I had to volunteer at agencies to make connections. I started doing this probably in June after graduation. 5 months later I heard of the job through connections at the place I was volunteering. They paid me less than the other person doing that job because they had a Masters degree and I had no experience. I did ok at the job it was reasonable training and tbh I was kind of rough around the edges at that point. It wasn’t a match made in heaven. Boomers had the corner on most of the good jobs, unless you happened to pick STEM or IT , so you kind of had to take what was left. The biggest thing about back then was that you were told by everyone including your parents that you had better figure out a way to support yourself. Because you couldn’t count on a man or marriage to protect you. But you received virtually no guidance on how to get that goal moving or what you should pick to do. In college I waited tables to pay my rent the whole time, there wasn’t any time left over for making those peer connections or doing very many internships. Advising at the public university I attended was limited what classes I should take to graduate on time. We literally had to get articles for papers off the shelves at the library and pay for photocopying. You had to spend a whole day just getting your literature together. I used campus computers with dot matrix printers to write papers, and those labs closed at certain times so you had to structure your time quite a bit.

There was a lot of alcohol and drug use back then. Drinking age was18 which meant a lot of people were drinking at 15. No one said anything about that. I’m sure it didn’t help me have my head on straight.

I did that job for 3 years then went to grad school. I picked a field where there would always be various kinds of work in case I ever wanted to go in a different direction. I worked my butt off in grad school and after. Though it paid better than my major it was not well paying. I worked in the nonprofits for 19 years at wages where it was a challenge to support a family. Not impossible but a challenge. Got into management after 5 years, then Switched to government for what will be 20-21 years but the time I retire and started to do a lot better financially.

By 1994 the work dress code was still formal including nylons. This changed slowly, I can’t say I remember when workplace casual became a thing. I’m glad it did though.

Throughout work I’ve always worked extra hours esp in management. You had to be careful about taking vacation due to coverage. Office Politics were a thing just like now. But I’ve had so many good opportunities for development and creativity over the years. It’s been a good career with a lot of great people. The biggest problem was that Boomers wouldn’t retire and my whole generation mostly all of us were already too old by the time the cherry jobs finally became available. Enter Millennials. Those little charmers. Not.

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Haisha4sale@reddit

Most jobs aren’t indoors staring at a screen. You can work outside, work on your feet, work with hour hands.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

That's what I did for the first 10 years of my adult life haha

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Haisha4sale@reddit

Yeah. We are all going to get old. I’m 48 and I can just tell you what I’ve observed. My friend group and I were all pretty poor. Borderline hungry but we had housing and we would eat 7 eleven hot dogs and load up the chili and cheese. One now teaches community college so he is tenured. $94k, three day weekends, summers off and retirement. I somehow made it to dental school and own my own clinic. Mid six figures, three days weekends and I am my own boss. One runs a theater making close to $200. One guy is struggling. Some doctors from my pre-dental days. One is a high level HR person that makes close to $200k work from home (she had a cushy childhood compared to the rest of us). If I had to find what we had in common, definitely everyone is smarter than the average bear. Everyone works or did work hard in their 20, 30 into 40s. Everyone kept after it, moved when they had to for the right opportunities. Probably a little luck here and there.

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Ta_mere6969@reddit

I had a BA in French. Had a really difficult time finding meaningful work off the back of it. Lots of anxiety around that, a lot of "did I make bad life choices?" thinking around the turn of the century.

My hobbies included systems and IT stuff, that was what got me in the door to a software job in 2001.

Since then, I've been involved with software or software-adjacent jobs: IT, AV, data, BI, integration, systems, etc. and for the most I've been stable.

The biggest leap I got came after I got a masters in a useful subject for a field that paid well. Any youngsters out there reading this: a BA degree by itself may not pan out. If I could do things differently, I would have double-majored in French and something engineering or business, that would have saved me a lot of heartache.

My path wasn't linear by any means.

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kittyshakedown@reddit

I had a great legit job right after college. I worked with a lot of people the same age and same situation. There was a lot of pressure to constantly perform very well. Constant competition.

Let’s just say we were anxious AF. About our jobs, losing it, doing well, promotions, pay…all of it.

And add in all the life things that happen and we were literally at the edge of our seats. All the time.

We drank a lot when we weren’t at work. But I made some long lasting incredible friendships. 45 out of 50 of us are more than fine now.

I’m 51 now and when I look back it makes me wonder what the hell was the big deal? It was the most carefree time of my life. Or should have been.

Anyway…every feeling you have is normal. Completely. I think it’s more of everything is so unknown in your youth. Every situation, feeling, reaction is new. Then you get older and experience things more than once and realize it’s all going to be alright.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

Thank you for this response, it honestly made me feel a lot more hopeful about the future

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Independent-Dark-955@reddit

I don’t think I started feeling this level of anxiety until the 2008 Great Recession’s impact hit my industry in 2009. Lately though my anxiety is at 11.

Times were tough when I got my BA in 1989. Good jobs were scarce and you really had to settle for one that you could barely get by on. Of course, many things like rent were more affordable. However, it wasn’t a time where you needed to stress about back up plans for your back up plans or societal collapse feeling like a distinct possibility. The current time is next level anxiety.

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thor_strong1@reddit

I went into the military right after high school. I spent 20 plus years in the military. Always had enough money, even with a family. Never really worried about my job security. Although the hours and working conditions (middle east a few times) sucked at times.

Now I work as a federal employee, getting my military pension and VA compensation. I figured I put in time to live comfortably in my older age.

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DogOfSparta@reddit

You can be let go with a snap of the finger, whether you are aware or anxious about it is more of a personality thing. I am an anxious person and this economy sucks so I am very aware of it right now.
What you are describing as a “cushy” remote job is not. Some people do have trouble with the lines blurring with WFH, but those hours are not the norm or at least not the expectation everywhere. My husband is in IT and even when he is on call he doesn’t have a schedule like that.
Yeah things were different before cell phones. If we missed a call while we were out, that was normal. Boss didn’t expect to be able to reach you 24/7.

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Ms_ankylosaurous@reddit

Canada. Yes - I pulled a lot of overtime in my 20s and 30s. I have experienced sexism and discrimination and am out of fucks to give now. Technology rapidly evolved over this time and internet access was not guaranteed in my early years. Constant evolution is necessary.

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digawina@reddit

When I was 32, it was 2004 and I worked for a declining major retailer in IT. We had layoffs constantly and I spent the majority of my 30s riddled with anxiety over my job insecurity. I spent a lot of that "on call" as well. There was no WFH, but I was tied to a pager, and later a blackberry, and had to leave dinners out, face reams of pages when exiting things like plays, physically go to the office on holidays to reboot a server, etc. It was awful. When I decided I wanted to change careers, then I was working full time and going to school at night. That whole decade of my life is a blur, frankly.

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LuceLeakey@reddit

I was 32 in 2001. I was working in IT for a very large consulting company and was placed at a pharmaceutical company. I enjoyed the work, liked all my coworkers but one, had friends and hobbies and was married. I got 6 weeks vacation every year and paid holidays. I didn't own a home yet.

I don't remember any work-related stress aside from my very long commute.

I was with that company for 12 years altogether, until I got laid off in 2009 during the housing crisis. By then I had transferred to a manufacturing company with new co-workers (one of whom was horrible). But the job was still great.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

I don't remember any work-related stress aside from my very long commute.

This statement is hard for me to even understand haha

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MiserableCuss54@reddit

Had a lot of shit jobs, but am surprised how little I could earn and still have a place to live, etc.

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fridayimatwork@reddit

I grew up too poor to want anything more than a paycheck and place to live. It wasn’t hard to get a job but hard to make do because I picked a hcol area. I slept on a piece of foam that my sisters dog had slept on for over a year because I couldn’t afford a bed. I worked a ton of overtime and barely had money for even visits home. No one had an in unit washer and dryer lol. We realized we’d never be able to buy and moved to a lcol area. My husband got fired and I got laid off. We eventually got more jobs but there were many trials to come.

The simpsons isn’t real life.

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whatgives72@reddit

Older boomers in the c suite trying to cop a feel at sales meetings. Low pay. Missed raises but male counter parts getting raises for the same work output. Yeah, it was a party. This was after being unemployed for a year after college. I would still do the 90s over though.

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Insightseekertoo@reddit

In my teens, I worked so I could play. Just out of college, I worked to gain prestige and be known in my field. At that time, if you were good and not an a-hole to work with, you were rewarded and promoted. That was the 90s.

In the new melinium, things changed. It seems like it happened suddenly. It did not matter how good you were it was about how many hours you put in and how strong the relationship with your manager was. I bowed out of the corpo life mid-2015 and opened my own business after I had a philosophical disagreement with my manager where I was trying to put the user needs above the product teams wants.

That's just my perspective. Your experience may vary.

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Expert_Habit9520@reddit

Let’s put it this way, I absolutely think corporate culture was better in the ‘90s and into the ‘00s than it is now. It doesn’t mean things were perfect but it genuinely was better than the way things have been from 2020-2026.

This current decade had the first major worldwide pandemic in 100 years. Plus the rise of Artificial intelligence plus a huge shift to remote work has turned the job market upside down. Unemployment is rough in any era but I think this is currently the worst job market in my lifetime for those seeking employment.

I’ve heard 2008-2012 or so was bad but I think we’re in a decade we’re living in now is even worse than that era was for employees or job seekers.

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ancientastronaut2@reddit

Also offshoring.

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Expert_Habit9520@reddit

Yep, I think the shift to remote work has accelerated offshoring. If a job can be done at home in the USA, it can probably be done from home in Tunisia, or the Phillipines, or India, etc. and probably for much lower wages. The remote work boom is actually an overall negative for USA based employees especially once you lose a job and are forced to look for a new one.

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ancientastronaut2@reddit

I don't think the correlation is quite as strong as you say. It all comes down to $$ and offshoring whatever % of employees is one way for them to pinch pennies regardless of whether the US employees are in office.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

I've done a lot of complaining in this thread about my own situation; but god, I really feel for the kids who are just graduating college right now. It's become even more unstable, competitive, and stagnant at the same time. No one is hiring, but if they are hiring, kids have to be the best of the best...

As disgusted as I am by manosphere/scam culture in young men, I also see that it's born of a desperation to exit this economy. A way to make money that doesn't involve this kind of unyielding grind and uncertainty. Similar with tradwives... at first I was so upset to hear young girls talk about reversing all the progress of women over the years... now I understand they too, are looking for a way to live life outside of the unending demand of the current job market.

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mary_wren11@reddit

It was absolutely normal not to be able to get a professional job and to be busting your ass in the service industry. Younger people seem to think that their parents lives as mid/ late career professionals were the norm for young people starting out and that is absolutely not true.

I currently work in an office that is still living in the 90s. There is so much cursing, screw up and you will get yelled at, there is no training and no documentation but if you fuck up it's on you, our HR lady favorite phrase is 'well, I don't know what to fucking tell you", take PTO and the boss will call to ask you random questions. I was sitting in my boss's office the other day while he was on the phone and he slams the phone down and yells "that cocksucker owes me 20 grand." Thankfully they don't seem to hire anyone under 40 because younger people wouldn't last a day.

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Sudden_Idea9384@reddit

This sounds like my kind of workplace

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mary_wren11@reddit

It's hilarious. It would be an amazing HBO Max show. Everyday when I come in people are reading the newspaper and shooting the shit in the break room, like the olden days

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

Thank you, this was actually great to read. I think you're right - I wouldn't last a day! The normalization of constant surveillance has also created a pretty sterile work culture. At my job, no one ever raises their voices, curses, or would talk the way your HR lady talks. Instead it's all couched in passive, friendly, evil tones. If I ever complained about lack of documentation, I would get a long smile and a "sounds like you just volunteered to create the documentation! Have a draft sent to me by Friday, or would you prefer I log this complaint in your record? If you have too many complaints on your record, you'll get put on a PIP, so it would be wonderful for everyone instead if you just added this project to your task list. :) Thank you for being such a team player!"

But it's true, I have no idea what it was like on the ground level for my parents, or what they had to tolerate to get to senior positions. My stepdad was the head of his department by the time I was old enough to pay attention.

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mary_wren11@reddit

That does sound awful. My mantra at work is "whatever you say to me, I'm still getting paid on Friday" and I do find that motivating.

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JJQuantum@reddit

In my 20’s I worked 2 full time jobs to make ends meet, one of them in food service, and for a while over 100 hours a week. I had to in order to make enough to live. I ignored the white noise around me and simply did the job to the best of my ability. I constantly, then and even now at 56, evaluate myself to see if there is anything I can do to do my job better or, more importantly, more efficiently. The latter is what’s important as that is a huge dictator of how much time I have to spend working.

If you are having to work too much then it’s either because you are inefficient or because your boss sucks, or both. You have to be brutally honest with yourself and how you work. Are you duplicating work? I see that a ton, especially with younger people. Have you quiet quit? Are you doing things in the best order? Are you stopping to scroll on your phone every 15 minutes? Are you stopping by coworkers’ desks multiple times a day to “say hi” or “discuss something in person”? Are you spending time and energy stressing about the amount of work you have instead of just doing the work? Do you spend time being pulled away by others instead of doing the work you need to be doing? Do you spend your time jumping between tasks instead of sticking to one until it’s done and then moving in? All of these things and more directly affect how many hours a week you put in and as a result how stressed you are about work.

If you can honestly say that you are doing things 100% the best way and are still putting in too many hours or experiencing too much stress then you need to look at you boss and company. Make sure though. If you think the company would tank without you then the problem is you, not the company. If you see others stressing and working long hours then you likely are in a bad company/have a bad boss. If you are confident that you are great at your job and haven’t been offered a promotion in 3 years then it’s time to leave. Start looking for another position. Don’t quit your current job until you find a new one. Have a professional write your resume.

Although I have a full time job and make more money than I ever have before I realistically work about 20 hours a week from home nowadays. I have coworkers who do the same job as me and yet are under more stress and work more hours. The job market was tough back in the 90’s just like it’s tough now. It’s up to you to make your life the best you can make it.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

If you are having to work too much then it’s either because you are inefficient or because your boss sucks, or both. You have to be brutally honest with yourself and how you work. Are you duplicating work? I see that a ton, especially with younger people. Have you quiet quit? Are you doing things in the best order? Are you stopping to scroll on your phone every 15 minutes? Are you stopping by coworkers’ desks multiple times a day to “say hi” or “discuss something in person”? Are you spending time and energy stressing about the amount of work you have instead of just doing the work? Do you spend time being pulled away by others instead of doing the work you need to be doing? Do you spend your time jumping between tasks instead of sticking to one until it’s done and then moving in? All of these things and more directly affect how many hours a week you put in and as a result how stressed you are about work.

I appreciate the thoughts on work flow, and I honestly think these are great questions everyone should ask themselves. Especially your following point about thinking about the company, and how it fits for you.

Am I duplicating work? Yes, because my predecessors failed to document anything, part of my job is to dig through their old files and try and piece together their processes. Now I own the processes and get blamed for anything that does not happen smoothly.

Am I doing things in the best order? I have no idea. My boss texts/calls constantly, but it's to seek reassurance for her own anxieties. She has nothing to offer me in terms of guidance or mentorship. Yesterday we spent an hour talking about how anxious she is for an upcoming event, and how I am going to need to do most of the presenting for the event. In other words, I discovered during that phone call that I will actually be speaking to a group of 100 people while my boss sits on the sidelines; and therefore suddenly found out that I need to build the presentation, write the script, and help the venue with setup/layout, which also means recruiting the volunteers.

Where does that fit in with my current, ongoing tasks? Should I now skip my next morning meeting because I'm trying to prepare for this sudden, other thing? It feels like my job has nothing to do with proper priorities, and instead reading the mood aura of management, and what they're most anxious about in any given moment.

Do I spend time scrolling my phone, being pulled away from others, or walking to other's desks? No, I have no time for that. I work alone and work constantly.

Do I spend time jumping between tasks and not finishing any of them? Yes, and that's what's required. That's exactly what's so stressful. I am holding 60 threads/projects/WIP tasks at any given time.

Start looking for another position. Don’t quit your current job until you find a new one.

I have been doing this, and it's part of why I made this post. I want to leave my current job; but it took me years to get. A co-worker who was recently put on a PIP quit before they could get fired, and now four months later are freaking out about still being unemployed. I talked with them, and just felt like my own anxieties were being reflected back at every level. This person has accomplished amazing things in their career, years of work under their belt, highly skilled. If they're not competitive, I don't stand a chance. And how can it be that everyone I talk to feels that exact same way?

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ancientastronaut2@reddit

I enjoyed working at several of my older jobs and miss it when things were more simple before I joined the Tech/SaaS craze.

I miss when things were transactional and you simply followed a process to completion. I used to be an "account manager" in more of a non-sales sense. I'd mostly manage purchase orders and shipments for clients in a manufacturing environment. I'd get a performance bonus that was very clear cut.

In SaaS Customer Success, I initially made more money than I ever had but there's always this ambiguous and mysterious "outcome" you're trying to help the customer achieve which may never happen. You're always chasing a carrot and the goal posts are constantly moving. And so much is out of your control, like if the product is buggy.

And now companies are not paying as big of salaries as they used to for this. The CSM bubble has burst. (With the exception of maybe a unicorn who's done enterprise level for some huge recognizable companies.) My last job was offshored after I hired and mentored an offshore team, they decided they didn't need me.

Finding a new job last year was harder than it's ever been my whole life. And that whole process has become so ridiculously performative. I felt like a seal barking for a fish.

I desperately wanted to move away from SaaS due to all the instability, but nobody would hire me because I haven't been in that space formover ten years. So I'm still here but am back to making what I did seven years ago.

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xxMalVeauXxx@reddit

Today's younger generation saying "I'm depressed, I'm anxious" was our "It doesn't matter, I don't care, No One Else Cares, You're Gonna Die From Something."

We wanted jobs because it's how we were able to buy and do things. We'd get jobs without our parents knowing or caring. Where were our parents? We didn't even go home sometimes and our parents didn't care. So our outlook on jobs, work, etc, was different. Now young people are with their parents forever and maybe their parents actually care about them making it in life, so there's all this pressure to go to school, get a career and do all the things. Gotta be a lot of anxiety with that.

We worked for $3 an hour and it went pretty far. That's another big difference, the economy. The Nixon to Regan years, you could buy stuff for what today looks like nothing. But the income was lower too, but you could afford a car, gas, a place to stay, etc, on low income. Living basic was easy.

We grew up with no one watching. No one was taking pictures or videos and sharing them. No one was recording what you said. Everything was oral history and for your eyes only. Now? Everyone is watched, recorded, cataloged. Today's youth feel compelled to be installed into a system and give away their information, identity, etc, and spend all their time "missing out" watching doom scroll reels or whatever that are 100% fake influencer slop. Now AI on top of that and a blistering war monger dictator economy of the US? What a horrible time to grow up in the USA. I think we all get it.

Wanna know what freedom was? You could drag an RV out into the woods. Gas was less than a dollar. You could live there. Do whatever. Live however. No one came looking for you. No one tried to force code. You weren't on a camera map being looked over by AI looking for reasons to fine or bill you for something.

Now? People are nervous because the dead internet makes them feel like they're missing out. Unplug. Go outside. Stop looking at the fake online world. You'll feel better.

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jkinmaryland@reddit

I am in the science & engineering sector. In my early 30’s, it was the late 80s/early 90s and i was on my 3rd job out of college. I had two kids, a mortgage, and two car payments during some tough economic times. Fortunately, my wife had a career as well.

Yes, often worked 50 - 60 hours/week and volunteered for many tasks that others did not want to touch. Paid off in that I survived multiple layoffs and moved steadily up the corporate ladder with this and other employers. Best advice I can give - Work hard and listen more than you speak. Good luck!

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drowninginidiots@reddit

I worked construction or construction related jobs from my teens till my late ‘20s. Any time I needed a job, I could get one within a week. Pay was usually sufficient to get by but didn’t leave much extra most of the time. Overtime was rare as employers didn’t want the extra costs.

No cell phones or internet meant only really being reachable during work hours. If an employer needed to get ahold of you, they had to call in the evening or early morning, leave a message if you had an answering machine, or just try and hope you were home.

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Bokononfoma@reddit

By the time I was 30 I had been laid off 3 times and had the companies I worked for go bankrupt twice. That was before the financial housing BS that happened in 2006-2008 - I bought a place in 2006 that immediately lost value. I regularly worked 80-100 hours weeks when I was "paying my dues" in public accounting, travelling on Friday and Sunday nights. That was salaried by the way. No OT for me and bonuses were small up front. Nothing to show for it now other than I still have high status at Westin Hotels.

As far as I'm concerned times are tough, and they've always been tough. That's never going to change. I just try and focus on my life and the immediate world around me. I want to get as clear of a perspective as I can. It seems like perspective gives me more peace than anything these days.

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jenorama_CA@reddit

This is why I hate WFH. I need work to be work and home to be home.

I started my working life in retail and accidentally wandered into tech by way of AOL tech support which ended up getting me a job at Apple. I was at Apple for 21 years and like any big corporation it will eat you alive if you let it. For a long time, I was more than happy to do dumb shit like take my work machine on vacation and email reports on Fridays before I finally realized that no one is giving out awards for most dedicated employee while on vacation and if I kept on doing that, it would just become normalized and expected.

So I quit that baloney, but there are things you can’t avoid when deadlines loom and I was always willing to put in extra effort when it made sense. The problem is that it takes a while in your professional life to develop that Spidey sense and to get others to trust and believe in your judgement and expertise. So what do you? You keep your head down and you execute.

I’m going to share the story of the time I almost got fired. I was a manager. I had to fire a person for policy reason I didn’t agree with, but there wasn’t really any way around it. This guy was one of the best guys on my team, but he did a dumb thing, so adios. A few months later, I saw him back on campus, contracting on another team. Kinda weird, but okay. Turns out, maybe I should have told someone and I was no longer a manager. My manager apparently really had to go to bat for me, for which I am eternally grateful, but I was given a not very desirable assignment off campus. I felt some kind of way about it and got a talking to that made my somewhat tenuous position clear. So, I put my head down and I executed. And I became the expert in that area, pioneered the whole test philosophy and built two labs before I left in 2022. My last manager called me a rockstar.

Towards the end of my time, I’d see kids like you come into the Apple meat grinder. My last team has a penchant of hiring new grads and working them hard. Well, they work everyone hard. But these are just kids that don’t know it’s okay to say, “No,” every now and then. These guys will literally schedule a call at 7pm that will go until 9. If it’s not a line down situation, I’m not available. It’s up to you to figure out your work/life balance because your job will say “We want our employees to have healthy boundaries.” This is a lie. You might think your manager is going to be pissed off if you take your break or lunch, but they’re not. Stand up for yourself. I still remember a conversation I had with one of the kids like eight years ago now. He had a Dr appt, but his manager was asking him to come in at that time to do some work and I was like, tell him you have a Dr appt. And this kid was all, “But, manager…” and I was just, “You have a Dr appt. End of.”

You need to eat lunch. You need to take a break. No one’s going to get mad at you for that.

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Last-Relationship166@reddit

When I was 23, I got a job working for a software startup. For the first year, I wrote a number of Bourne shell scripts, set up Unix servers, helped customers over the phone, installed servers at client sites. The next year, I got a raise...and a pager, going on pager rotation every other week.

I'd get 6-7 pages a night, minimum, every other week. One time, our developers deployed an upgrade to a client on a Friday...without mentioning it. When they extracted the tar file, they ended up setting the ownership of every file they overwrite to root:root (super user, basically). We had a cronjob (automated task) that rebooted all our remote servers at 2AM Saturday morning. That machine rebooted and then couldn't start up all the way, because the operating system didn't have permissions to start a number of the daemons (services). However, the server was able to run a script that sent me a page every half hour from 2AM on Saturday until 6:30 AM Monday morning (This client didn't staff their data center over the weekend, and I needed an operator to move some serial cables so I could connect to the server. I couldn't turn my pager off, because I'd miss other pages.

I worked that nightmare for 4 more years. It was hell.

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Hedonistic_Yinzer@reddit

" The Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt give some great insight into the causes of the generational anxiety you discuss. Learning about this phenomenon can help you deal with it on a personal level.

Not every job is like the one you described. There are jobs that value employees and value employees having a work-life balance. Some of those jobs may expect you to come to an office 5 days a week. The good part of that is when you leave the office you leave the work behind. It does sound, to me, that you may need to start setting some boundaries with work. I know that can be tough, especially when you feel the job market is so soft. Setting good boundaries, especially from the onset, helps eliminate these feelings.

I wish you the best of luck and hope it works out and you find a worthwhile solution.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

Thank you very much, and for the recommendation also!

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Mom_who_drinks@reddit

My degree was in marketing but due to a series of events that I landed in HR. By 32, I had acquired the skills and knowledge I needed to be a “real” HR person. My career was just about to take off. HR jobs were plentiful at the time and I was able to rapidly increase my pay (and titles but titles were never the goal).

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ApatheistHeretic@reddit

Communications flowed more slowly and power/decision making was more distributed so that lower mgmt had more influence.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

I would be interested in a study about real-time decision making, and how that impacts work culture. Part of my stress is how quickly communication flows right now - management might make one decision, communicate it to all of us, and then reverse the decision before the end of the day. And then because we're WFH, we're completely alone with how to handle those changes, and to decide what changes we need to make in our own management decisions. It feels like one huge guessing game, and if you guess wrong, you are OUT.

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Astronaut6735@reddit

I graduated with a degree in Computer Science at the age of 31 in the middle of the dot com bust. I wrote and submitted resumes tailored for each of several hundred job openings, got three in-person interviews, and only one job offer at a lower salary than I wanted, which would require moving half way across the country. I was a nervous wreck, and took the job.

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cjr91@reddit

Same for me. I was 29 at the time. I had a job lined up with a semester to go but they rescinded it just a couple of months before graduation. I ended up taking the only offer I got for a Software QA job for less money.

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grin_ferno@reddit

My first jobs I was part of a union. It was AWESOME.

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SirkutBored@reddit

The stressors are the same if the money goes up and the responsibility goes up. They can try and put the same pressure on you at at an entry level service job, 'we need you to fill in last minute, do this extra thing, skip your lunch, you need another break??' but the pay is low and there's less attachment to keep you from just walking.

You have to come to the same conclusion many of us did. You figure out how to make it work because you have to or you figure out something else out because the cost is too high. I was recently in a similar overworked, overstressed situation and the phrase I came up with was 'if the fear of keeping the job is more than the fear of losing it'.

The competitive level has always been there when you get beyond the first few rungs but it's the field that decides how supportive or cutthroat it is.

At the end of the day the only decision that has to be made is, is it worth it? From this outsiders viewpoint I'm not sure it is, it sounds like you're losing yourself.

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WimpyZombie@reddit

This reminds me of the cartoon that was going around during Covid where a fast food worker was talking to the manager and the manager said something like "We would have never called you an essential employee if we knew you expected us to pay you like one."

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ToxicAdamm@reddit

Just view work as a problem solving puzzle.

Every day you show up and try to solve puzzles. Clock out and don't take it home with you.

Do that and you'll be better than 80% of your co-workers who are constantly bitching and working harder to get out of work, than doing the work.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

I wish... my boss was texting me at 11pm last night asking for project updates. There's no clocking out.

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SirkutBored@reddit

That's not right on so many levels. For your sake I hope the pay is incredible. If so, store those nuts little squirrel, you'll need em later.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

A solid $65k a year :/ the most I've ever made in my life so far though

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SirkutBored@reddit

it sounds crazier today than when my dad said it decades ago but it is true, it's not what you make it's what you spend. yes our costs are higher now which leaves less afterwards but if you have enough left to save a chunk each payday then you can prepare to weather any storm.

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ToxicAdamm@reddit

Try to set some boundaries with your time. If your boss is someone worth working for they will understand. If you never say anything, they will assume you are cool with it.

Also, every job has downsides. You just have to figure out what downsides you can live with/work around.

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WimpyZombie@reddit

This is an interesting way to look at it that I hadn't considered. My problem is that I am so damned bored that I can't keep my mind on my job. I start on a task, but my mind goes numb and my eyes start wandering around my office, and the next thing I know, I'm looking at Reddit.

If I didn't know better, I would think I had ADD. Can you develop ADD as an adult if you didn't have it as a child? Hmmm...

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bonzai2010@reddit

When I was 32, I was a well respected engineer at a computer company, just moving from engineering to management. The .com boom was over and everyone was struggling but if you were “in”, you were ok. I moved in order to keep on an upward trajectory.

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2_Bagel_Dog@reddit

Graduated in the mid-90s. I paid for college by working as an auto mechanic. Interviewed all over after college and did get several offers, but all were almost poverty wages compared to my mechanic job so I figured I would just keep doing that. I liked the work, but was really wondering if I was a bonehead for spending all that time and money on college. So I wasn't anxious but kinda mad.

Eventually I got a call from Super-Giant-Mega-Corp. Starting pay was only OK, but I could see a big upside in the potential. Been with the same Co now for 30-years. Not all have been great, but looking beyond the immediate situation can be the right thing to do.

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Virtual-Culture8830@reddit

What I have learned is calm your nervous system down. Your nervous system is the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic. Parasympathetic is the rest and digest State. When it’s totally out of balance, you’re in the “fright or flight stage“ all the time. And when you’re in that stage, you get sick. And I don’t mean a head cold. I mean, your body says something’s wrong, this is not right. And it’s hard to get out of. Do what you can to relax. Yoga, walks in the woods, even music. Relax. Get your body back into that parasympathetic state that says this is ok. I am safe. That’s when your body will take care of you. When you’re in that sympathetic state, things go awry.

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NoRestForTheWitty@reddit

Yes! You can’t control other people, but you can control your reaction.

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WimpyZombie@reddit

When I first graduated from community college back in 1989, I went into a field that was very high in demand - getting interviews before graduation, and they weren't even really interviews. Prospective employers actually took me out to lunch and they spent more time trying to sell themselves to me then they did actually interviewing me. A mere 4 years later and things kind of dried up- I got laid off and replaced by another new graduate, but they hired that person at a much lower pay rate.

I tried to go back to school for a nursing degree but I wasn't able to finish the program because I was diagnosed with epilepsy and lost my driver's license.

I finally found a job that paid over minimum wage (but not much!) with the State government, and then eventually got my driver's license back (after not having it for 17 years). Now I'm 60 and I just recently started making the same annual wage I was making in 1991.

Yeah...back when I was younger (and I guess now still) my whole theme of life is "whatever". Part of me is stressed out because I don't see myself ever being able to retire, and definitely not own a home, but I'm also kind of glad that I learned to say "whatever" and I'm not nearly as anxious as millenials seem to be. Or maybe I just learned to handle it better than them?

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sedona71717@reddit

I graduated from college during the recession in the early 90s. It was hard to find a job but not impossible. When I was your age I was working at a national nonprofit. It was stressful as all jobs are, but it was not like it is today. We had fun in the office. We weren’t glued to screens. Covid and WFH broke something in the workplace and the culture. I suspect it’s because during covid there wasn’t much else to do other than work at home, so people worked a lot and were extremely, unusually productive, and that mentality stuck. I am currently managing a team of 20 extremely stressed out, plates-full people, and I am feeling extreme stress from the knowledge that I can only do so much to mitigate their stress. When organizations adopt KPIs that are unreasonable, something will break.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

My work is a statewide nonprofit, and things have gotten pretty crazy this last year with all the DOGE cuts and changes to grant funding. We've actually been awarded big grants a couple times, and then had the distribution delayed, or only partially paid out, or one grant that was awarded and then cut altogether. So there's a high level of stress as week to week our funding changes from $1.5 million to only $100k to actually no grants at all, to actually maybe $300k.

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gopms@reddit

I have a pretty boring, normal, office job and have had one since the 90s. It is very different these days that it used to be. In the past, we had zero flexibility, office hours were 8:30 - 4:30, Monday to Friday. No changing them to accommodate child care, no working from home, no nothing. If those hours didn't work for you then the job wasn't for you. But, we also worked Monday to Friday 8:30 - 4:30 and then went home and didn't do any work or even think about work much. For the first 10 years of my career, the only way for anyone to even ask you to do anything work related outside of work hours was to pick up the phone and call you and no one ever did that (in my job) unless it was an actual emergency. I received three phone calls outside of work hours in the first 10 - 12 years of my job. Once because my boss forgot I had the day off and was worried that I hadn't shown up, once because movers showed up a day early and no one knew what was going on, and once because someone died and I needed to do something on a weekend as a result. That's it! So, the downside was no flexibility but the upside was no work encroaching on home life. Also, because I work in an environment where most people stay for their whole career (a university) and we all worked in the office all the time, we really did make friends. A huge chunk of my friends are ones I have made over the years at work. Having someone to gab with in the photocopier room or as you walk to and from a meeting makes all the difference. If you talk to someone day in and day out it is hard not to build a relationship with them over time. We did goof around a fair bit (coffee breaks were a thing!) but we also got our work done.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

Reading this made me want to cry. I'm very jealous of everything you've written here :( But I really appreciate the sharing, and the perspective. This entire thread has been great to hear different life experiences.

I am expecting a call from my boss every day at all times. Yesterday she called me both at 1pm (during the work day) and at 11pm (after blowing up my phone with texts, and wondering why I wasn't responding).

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kermitsfrogbog@reddit

Graduated in 1997 from college and already had my first job lined up. It was an entry level job in the company I wanted to work for. NOT the job I wanted to do. But it was a foot in the door. I worked my way into the job I actually wanted within a year. I recognize that I was extremely lucky that the entry level job was available at the time when I needed it, as it's a pretty niche business.

Throughout the years, I've always managed to get office work. It wasn't always in the field I wanted. I took a big hit at 30 when I had to start over and take a lower paying entry level job yet again. But I worked my way up in that field and am doing ok now.

Big corporate jobs for me had a lot more down time and were calmer in general. Frustration was mostly due to useless meetings and red tape or processes that made no sense to me. And that one time we were forced to work until midnight after working a normal day shift due to budget deadlines, but my department's numbers weren't even looked at until the end of the night. I literally sat there doing nothing until it was my turn. I also felt expendable in these big companies. Like my number could be up at any time. And it was. In 2006 and again in 2007. One because of cutbacks. One because I was bad at the job.

It wasn't until I got a job with a small construction company that I feel like I'm always on go, go, go mode. There's so much to do at all times, it's no joke. But I feel appreciated. What I do matters. It's a HUGE difference from the corporate jobs. But you're right. When WFH, the lines between home and work blur a bit. If not for my family, I'd work more probably, but I do try to set boundaries. I use DND on the phone to avoid the anxiety spike that comes with evening notifications. But the feeling that I could be out on my ass any day never really leaves. I've been with this company for 12 years. I'm not sure what it will be like if/when I need to find another job.

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airckarc@reddit

We had to work a lot of hours but when you were off, it’s not like you’d get a text or email from work. I didn’t have a cell phone until 2006. Rent was cheaper and a population dip meant there were more jobs.

When we were struggling or stressed, we didn’t talk about it. So we maybe had to suffer, but we also weren’t having everyone telling us how horrible everything was 24/7.

When we did see friends, it was in person at bars or coffee shops. When you went to the same places, it felt like you were part of a community.

But to put things in perspective, since the Industrial Revolution, people were working more hours with less safety. 12 hours a day, 6.5 days per week. Before that, people were mostly farming and hoping they wouldn’t starve to death. Yeah, things now can be stressful but imagine looking at a field of crops that have just been destroyed by a blight and knowing you might die in January. It takes a pretty comfortable environment to be consumed by existential dread as opposed to having enough to eat, or watching your kid die from a fever.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

When we were struggling or stressed, we didn’t talk about it. So we maybe had to suffer, but we also weren’t having everyone telling us how horrible everything was 24/7.

This is a super interesting point, imo. Us millennials were super proud of breaking generational traumas, and actually talking about our mental health, going to therapy, normalizing all of that. I do think that as a consequence, it's become a little too normal to go online and cry about how hard life is. I see victim complexes everywhere, and everyone talking all the time about how horrible their lives are.

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NorCalJason75@reddit

Us millennials were super proud of breaking generational traumas, and actually talking about our mental health, going to therapy, normalizing all of that.

No no no... You're giving your generation WAY too much credit.

Society created LABELS for trauma. People confuse the labels with actual work. The trauma is still there. Which leaves you confused. You're wondering why because you see it, it's not magically gone.

Having the language is helpful for understanding the issues, but isn't the same as growth.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

Very very true. I think we're just now realizing this... when I say we're "proud" of it, I mean that's the narrative we fed ourselves for a long time. In my own early internet days, I was on Tumblr and Neopet forums with a bunch of other teenage girls, discussing feminist theory and the latest additions to the DSM-5. We felt very enlightened, like the access to the internet and information was putting us ahead of the curb on self-understanding.

Now there's a bunch of millennials out there who are aware of their issues, and wield them like weapons in self-defense victim complexes. "You can't criticize me because I self-diagnosed a parentified anxiety disorder!" We found the language but continue the cycles.

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NorCalJason75@reddit

Yes! And some use it as a crutch. But again, this isn't new/unique.

I think you're just awakening to how the world actually is.

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Seachica@reddit

It’s about expectations. I graduated in 1992, into a major recession. Jobs were hard to come by, and it seemed like I’d never get started. I temped for several companies and did an unpaid internship before going back to school for a master’s. Once I got my master’s, the economy was a bit better but more importantly I leveraged my grad school alumni network to land my first job. That first job was grunt work and paid poorly, but I didn’t expect anything more. It was a start, and all I needed was a chance to learn on the job. That was a different era, but with parallels to today. The internet was just starting, and it would go on to change everything. It was a huge opportunity for the young to grow with change, a lot like AI is today. Different was the idea that you would work from home. I had to go into an office everyday, which I still like. I met friends through work and I met mentors there too. I had a clear break between work and home life, and there were no cell phones. Working from home is very isolating, and just isn’t good for young people starting their careers.

No one I knew expected to start as a manager, or even as anything but a grunt worker.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

I think this hits the nail for me.

No one I knew expected to start as a manager, or even as anything but a grunt worker.

I had the opposite expectation. Each time I have been hired as a grunt worker, I have been handed manager-level responsibilities without training, and with a high pressure to perform well. I am being paid like a grunt worker, without the ability to clock out, and without in-person access to friends, coworkers, or mentors who might help guide the work. Instead I have a distant boss without boundaries, and six faces on a zoom meeting. We've been asked to implement AI to adjust for the times, but the AI makes constant mistakes and makes my job harder at every level.

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Green_343@reddit

When I finished college I lucked out and found a job right away but many of my friends didn't - I'm late GenX and we graduated into the "dot com bust". I found work stressful and worried about losing my entry level job through the early 00's. Also no one talked about work life balance back then.

Honestly, just getting older has helped my attitude immensely. I'm very experienced now and I just don't care as much as I used to.

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TripMaster478@reddit

Same. I'm still anxious about being let go but last time I was I found a temp gig paying pretty close to what I was making within three days. Then found the job I'm at now about nine months later.

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electromouse1@reddit

I felt the same anxiety. Worked in a very unstable field during the dot com bust and we were having layoffs weekly for what seemed like years. Part of what was so anxiety inducing was that I was paycheck to paycheck and have a chronic illness that was flaring and incredibly expensive to treat. There was also a new law at the time that if you didnt have continuing coverage for a pre-existing condition, then you could be denied future coverage even through an employer. Meaning, you could not have a break in coverage. Which also meant you could not have a break in employment!

One thing I learned through that experience was that I was strong enough to figure it out. I didnt get laid off when I thought I would, and I did end up getting laid off when I thought I was safe! When a quarter of your industry is laid off at the same time, finding a new role felt impossible! But guess what? It wasn't. It required ingenuity. It required sweat and tears. But it wasnt impossible. My friends who thought it was impossible struggled a lot more than I did. I didnt have an option. I had to have health insurance or literal death was on the table for me. We have more power than we think. We have more options than we think. I switched industries because I had to. I didnt limit myself. And I made so many connections in the new industry, that I was able to get back to my chosen industry a few years later. Yes, years. I dont have the career that I thought I would when I was in college. But I am on track to retire a millionaire. There were many beans and rice years and sacrifices made for survival. We werent the boomers who could afford a six person household working at a gas station. And we werent the millenials getting $300k out of college for computer coding. We were stuck in the middle, just doing ok and working very hard to do better than ok.

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yodamastertampa@reddit

In 2002 just after 9/11 we had mass layoffs and people were looking for 6 months to get a job. They also had to take lower salaries sometimes 50% lower. My company also forced us to work weekends in the office for 3 to 4 months straight. When I pushed back my manager showed me a stack of resumes for people who would do my job for less.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

Sounds very similar to today. It's interesting to read about the rise of the internet during that time, and how change was happening at a fast-paced level back then too.

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yodamastertampa@reddit

Yeah. Then it happened again in 2008 2009.

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TripMaster478@reddit

That's not just WFH that's all jobs nowadays. I'm in charge of four software implementations, and one of them is different at every one of our ten plants. I can't manage. Nobody can. So I just do the best I can and sleep at nights. If they decide to toast me - which I'm anxious about to some degree because who isn't nowadays - joke's on them, they're still completely hosed.

But yes when I first graduated university I got a full time gig in finance immediately and went from there.

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LayerNo3634@reddit

I worked "go go go" from the day I turned 16. I worked 25-30 hours a week while going to college full time and graduated in 3.5 years. My entire career I worked 50-60 hours a week. Our 30's were spent advancing our careers and watching our 401K's lose more money than we put in, but we kept plugging away and contributing. It worked out, I retired at 55.

You talk about anxiety and ask if your generation is fragile. There are people in your generation that work like we did and some who whine and complain about working. I don't think your entire generation is fragile, but I do see a lot of people with issues. I blame social media and participation trophies. We had to compete for trophies and actually spoke to people.

In the 90's, it was popular to send Christmas letters to family and friends about what was going on in life. Every one sounded like their life was perfect. Every single one was embellished and fake. Social media is nothing more than 24/7 Christmas letters. My advice is to stay off.

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Simple-Marsupial3106@reddit

Well. When we graduated university and went to find work, the boomers were at their apex and had all the jobs. Not one of us ended up working in our fields.

BUT….

We had no cells and no computers. We had a group of friends that we got together with in person often. I moved out on a shoestring and expected to sit on the floor and have boxes of furniture because that’s how everyone did it.

Work was always uninspiring. We had countless in person meetings and paper files. Automation was supposed to reduce work, it just tripled it. We kinda just stuck it out, hoping boomers would retire. That mostly didn’t happen because 2008 happened and so did position elimination.

So are there differences? My son is Gen Z and ridiculously well educated. Lots of trouble finding a good job. Not interested in buying a house or kids or marriage. In my opinion, Gen X kind of still had traditional values imposed on us, but with the early advantage of technology after childhood. We built social networks in person, and I think (my opinion only) that these relationships sustained us all through the “it sucks” years. I think our expectations were lower, but I will say that you will get through all this… and coming out the other side is better than you can imagine!

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

We built social networks in person, and I think (my opinion only) that these relationships sustained us all through the “it sucks” years. I think our expectations were lower, but I will say that you will get through all this… and coming out the other side is better than you can imagine!

This is a huge part of it, for me. I had a solid friend group in college/post college that went hiking on the weekends. Now, in our 30's... I haven't seen my friends in person in months. I text them, but it's usually us all texting about how much life sucks. My best friend lives about a 10 minute drive away, but we didn't see each other all winter because we were both just working, and tired, and working, and texting each other about working.

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Vandilbg@reddit

That really doesn't get much better as you get older. You have to make time to see friends and it's either a weekly\monthly scheduled thing or a once\twice a year weekend. Try to be involved in groups to make new friends to replace the ones that move away or die.

In my 20s I used to be able to go grab a table on the sidewalk downtown and friends would just walk past and stop to hang out.

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awrythings@reddit

Prozac nation came out in 2001. Feelings are universal and your generation seems to think you are unique. You have a generation malaise about your lives. I do think you share more but lack genuine community. We didn’t all talk about our feeling but we all drank like fishes leaving work after at least 20 hours.

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jillyjobby@reddit

Never walk into a job you don’t know how to walk out of

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

I'm sorry, I don't even know what this means. If you mean having the savings to weather unemployment and having a backup exit plan... that would mean never walking into any job at all.

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jillyjobby@reddit

None of us fell backwards into our current situation. We had to walk off a lot of jobs

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

I literally don't understand what you're trying to say here

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jillyjobby@reddit

Well that’s too goddamn bad

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smpenn@reddit

Perhaps, one big difference, it was not unheard of to get a job, work it your entire career and retire with a pension. So, one could really buy into their company, on so many levels, and dedicate themselves to the organization.

I find it truly sad that it seems those kind of opportunities are not as readily available to young job seekers today.

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awrythings@reddit

If you aren’t anxious about losing something then it probably isn’t worth having. So you just stay on your “hop” and before you know it you’ll have made it. Grind on!

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1043b@reddit

When I graduated at 27 looking for my first 'real' job as a special education teacher I was pretty sure I'd find one, but not necessarily where I wanted to be. That was back in 1994.

I lost out on one I was promised by a principal when the personal director found someone more ethnically diverse, but found another nearby. I worked 10 hour days and worked a 2nd job on weekends in rental properties to make ends meet.

Over the summers I worked summer school mornings, camp afternoons and countined with the rental stuff on weekends. There wasn't time not to work in order to try to pay off student loans and save for a house.

Life stayed that way even after I was married and my kids were born. The difference was they came with on the weekends and went to the same summer camps.

Even with all of that and the good health insurance that came from teaching we never got to the level of security reached by the generation before us.

TDLR: worked all the time for years just to get by and pay for health insurance for family and house. Never as secure as parents. Stress level=insane

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Necessary-Peace9672@reddit

In the ‘80s & ‘90s there were more dirty jokes & day-drinking.

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Round_Ad8947@reddit

When I was young, jobs were out there but inconceivable by today’s standards. I worked in a bank one summer after college to reply to records for bankruptcy court. For eight hours at night, we pulled microfiche and hard printed credit records.

For my co-workers it was their career. For me, it was a means to an end. “Don’t go too fast, you make us look bad and will raise expectations” I was just bored and wanted to see how productive I could be in one shift. It was somewhat entertaining, people are always fun to be around, and the pay was good.

100% of this is gone, thanks to the internet. It took me a while to learn how to find a job (hint—it’s never easy). From your description, this is about being alone in a cutthroat world. My two happiest things are (1) working with a team that watches out for each other to get the job done, and (2) having the ability to work for an employee-owned company, free from quarterly stock targets or aloof management.

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EnjoyingTheRide-0606@reddit

I had a lot of anxiety when I was younger. One thing that helped is to accept in the moment stress lights a fire in you to achieve and produce results. I also had an awareness one day at 50 that I’d not gone hungry (unless I was fasting), homeless, or jobless. I will retire in 8 years, 2 months and 3 weeks.

So honestly I think what you’re experiencing is normal. But your generation, unfortunately, was very sheltered and you were sort of bubble wrapped until being turned loose for college. With relatively little survival skills. This created a past where you never took risks and achieved or failed, then learns. Your gen also had few ops to free range, which helps develop a sense of self, what’s important, what’s right and wrong. So you’re kind of like 14 years old trying to grow into your own skin while holding down jobs to pay for the debt they told you would be an investment in your future, sometimes with children, mortgages, and car payments.

My best advice: save a small emergency fund of $2500 then become debt free of all consumer debt. Then save a full emergency fund, start retirement and house down payment savings. This will help you to become more secure in doing hard things.

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Fresh-Pin5166@reddit

Aside from one job where I was completely and utterly out of my depth, work anxiety wasn't a thing for me throughout my 20s and much of my 30s. Now, nearing 50, things are getting to me. Stressed about deadlines, stressed about finances, anxious about losing my job and the economy in general, anxious about not having saved enough for retirement. Mind you, I'm doing ok. I have more money and resources now than I had in my 20s and 30s. Loving partner, 6 figure job, car is paid off, mortgage isn't but hey, I own my own place. But now I'm anxious, stressed, numb... and my poor unemployed younger self absolutely wasn't.

Aside from age/ time, there's another interesting factor playing into this equation for me. I moved from Europe to America in my early 30s. I'm generalizing here, but I'm sure that living in America, especially right now, is more stressful and anxiety-inducing than living in Europe, regardless of age.

I feel capitalism, social media, junk food... all of that really played a number on us.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

Honestly, what I'm gathering from people's responses is that experience varied a lot, but that the current state of America is giving everyone anxiety at every stage of life.

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TeenYearsKillingMe@reddit

I started working while in middle school/high school. Graduated in 2000. Jobs were plentiful and pay was decent. I'm from Texas, which is an at-will state, so the feeling that you could lose your job has always been there.

I suspect I have never experienced anything like what you are describing. I doubt most of us have because the job market, even when uncertain, was not the same as it is now.

I wouldn't say my jobs have ever been relaxed. There has always been unending work to be done.

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ONROSREPUS@reddit

At 32 I was just getting started at my current job. Been here 20 years now. I haven't worked a lick of over time since I have started. I learned from a young age that you NEED to separate work from private life. I never take work home with me and I usually forget where I was until monday morning when I get back to work.

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ToddBradley@reddit

I intentionally set things up for a life of leisure. After having worked "real" jobs during high school (construction and washing dishes), I told myself I wanted a career with air conditioning where I could sit down. So I got engineering degrees in college. That led to working as a software engineer.

Nobody talked about "work/life balance" back then. It was just assumed that after work you were going hiking or cycling or running or whatever. We only out in long hours about two weeks a year and the rest was around 40 hours a week.

We goofed off some during work but not to the degree people do now. Before cell phones nobody had a habit of spending five or ten minutes of every hour looking at their phone. So there was no doomscrolling, either, which I personally think kept overall anxiety low.

At some point in there my straight work friends my age started having babies, and that essentially ended their participation in friend groups. They no longer had fun after work, and all they ever talked about was child rearing, which I had no real interest in.

That's my recollection of life as a regular employee in my 20s.

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Anotherams@reddit

When I was 32 the internet and email were in their infancy, laptops were like cinder blocks, and so expensive only top C suites had them. Same with cell phones, we had pagers to keep in contact. So work rarely came home. It felt more relaxed because we didn’t have constant surveillance.

That said, there were still stressors. We didn’t have FML, Pregnancy protections or ACA. You could more easily lose your job and be in a real bind if you had preexisting conditions.

Sexual harassment was real, and rampant. Not to say it doesn’t exist today, just more protections.

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halfway_clear@reddit (OP)

I didn't mention it in my post, but I am a woman, and should consider things like this more. I don't think about it because I don't have to - I am treated the same as my male coworkers in terms of benefits, which is a huge boon.

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Anotherams@reddit

Gender discrimination was allowed back in the day. My mother was let go when she got married, she was a secretary for a judge who assumed she would be quitting once she was pregnant (she already was). You could be asked what your family plans were, if you were married and what your husband’s career was, and if you what your child care arrangements were in interviews. As recently as 2022 you could be denied an extra bathroom break while pregnant.

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FreeElleGee@reddit

I’m late Gen X and had essentially your experience, so no real advice to offer. I graduated in Dec 2001, right after 9/11, and it wasn’t easy to get a job. My first job out of school, laid me off after a year. I was worried about layoffs at every job after that. Got a job in 2006 where the employer would layoff every Friday. Maybe 1 person, maybe 50 people. You never knew if it was going to be you. I went remote in 2010 and was told that remote expects more than 8 hours a day. Essentially, the time you save on commuting, they want you working. This increased over time, but exploded during Covid. Suddenly I was working 18 hours a day, slightly less on weekends, living on 2 or 3 hours of sleep, always afraid of being laid off, family irritated with me, stressed beyond measure. I made it 4 years like that and was so burnt out I retired.

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emccm@reddit

It was a time of massive chance. Computers became more common in the work place and many jobs were automated out of existence. It was pretty much as it is today. Sink or swim. Those who embraced change did well. Those who didn’t stagnated or got knocked out completely.

Today it seems like more people expect jobs to be handed to them. People aren’t as prepared to start at the bottom and work their way up.

I’d say that today there’s more stress to perform but far, far, far more opportunities to grow and excell professionally and financially.

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Fun_Independent_7529@reddit

Not that difficult, no. I didn't worry that much about whether I'd find a job. Graduated from college in 1992. White collar work was available. Even during college breaks I was able to find temp office work.

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ruggerbear@reddit

Thinking back my career at 32, was working 55+ hours a week for a fixed salary, no over time. That was simply the expectation if you wanted to stay employed. Granted it was for a small venture capital funded company with a "progressive" retention policy. Every year, they would rank all the employees. The top 20% received a 10% bonus (above the cost of living increase), the second tier 20% got 5%. Then it became nasty. The middle 20% only received the cost of living increase with the fourth tier being put on an improvement plan. The bottom 20% were cut, to be replaced by new talent. The hope, and reason we busted our collective behinds, was to stick around long enough for the company to be purchased so everyone still there could get a piece of the payout. However, when we did eventually get acquired, that payout was pretty small. But we had all built up our skills and those of us that left were able to find better jobs.

The point is that 20 & 30s were for rapidly growing our repository of skills. We quite literally pushed ourselves to the absolute limit, and often over it. Burnout was high. And very unhealthy. But that was the culture. There was the constant fear that one screw-up would get you fired. Those of us that survived have learned a lot of hard lessons but still struggle to find a balance between work and personal ives.

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North-Bit-7411@reddit

Some advice. Try to build something of your own so you’re not at the mercy of others. I’ve been stuck at the same job for almost 40 years now because I didn’t have the nerve to take this advice myself.

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AZPeakBagger@reddit

My first big job out of college was in sales. Talk about stress, every day you woke up worried about hitting your monthly quota. To make matters worse, this had been a once great company that had been selling business products that everyone needed. So the sales managers still thought it was 1979 and didn't want to hear that computers were replacing what we sold. Needless to say, those managers were the most shocked when the company shut down in the early 2000's and a 100 year old company just shuttered.

But at 32 I had a stay at home wife, a couple of kids, a house and a few cars that all were being supported by my income. It was a big burden.

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Ok_Key_4731@reddit

I worked in a fast paced, high pressure environment for most of my career. You were only as good as the last mistake you made. If you left at 5:00 you were “leaving early.” I can’t imagine the amount of free work I did in the early part of my career. And I was, like you. a ball of nerves all the time.

Now I still work in a fast paced job but the expectations are sooooo much more chill. We aren’t expected to be online 24/7. There is a true work life balance and it is wonderful.

Being expected to be available 24/7 and working 12+ hours each day is not a good thing, no matter how old you are or what stage of your career you are in. You won’t look back at your life in your 50’s and say gosh I wish I’d spent more time at work. (I speak from experience) See those boundaries and if you get pushback, screw ‘em. They are taking advantage of you and your coworkers.

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imalloverthemap@reddit

I lucked out and got my job at an automotive Big 3 as an engineer before the downturn of 1990ish. Long story short, my peers have suffered all the same issues your generation does.

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ErnieHi@reddit

I worked 2 jobs in high school, never went to college, got a union job, took some training to make more money, worked nights, weekends holidays in the freezing cold and roasting heat of the Midwest, went to work sick, hurt and on days I had to force myself to face another day, took more training, stayed at it for 33 years, never made a ton of money but I never missed a paycheck, got a pension, retired and now I work part time. Saved my money, never bought new cars or fancy clothes, got married, always was smart with our money, took out a huge loan to buy a house, paid extra on the mortgage every month, had 2 kids, started saving for their college while they were in kindergarten, sold the house so we could move to a better school district, kids got partial scholarships, just paid off their college loans.

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WantDastardlyBack@reddit

It wasn't like that for everyone.

My first job was in the mortgage department of a bank. There were a few rules that we learned really quickly. First, the more legs you show, the higher the odds of a promotion or raise. The owner of that bank was older and really liked to see a lot of leg. Heels, nylons, short skirt for the win. After leaving that job because I wasn't enjoying being objectified, I entered a travel agency.

It was worse IMO. For three years, we were told to look incredibly busy even if it was dead. One client was a major bigwig in the area, and he'd bought an around-the-world cruise. When he booked flights, he only wanted to pick up the tickets in teh location where I was. The owner of the travel agency told me that I was not to argue with anything this guy said. To give him the tickets, please have him sign the cancellation waiver, collect the money, and keep him completely happy.

The guy arrived and told me the owner said he'd get 50% of his deposit back if he canceled. I called the owner to verify it was true, as that wasn't policy, and was told he wasn't available. The manager said I'd been told not to argue with the client and to do whatever he wanted.

I did, and it was apparently wrong. I got screamed at in front of clients for being a "dumb blonde." The manager denied telling me to "do whatever the client said" and threw me under the bus. I quit shortly after. For three years, I'd dealt with $5 an hour (1988 to 1991) and owners saying the company car needed replacing, so they couldn't afford raises again. After being screamed at in front of clients and co-workers, it wasn't worth staying.

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-Granby-@reddit

When I was fresh out of high school in 1995 it was easy to find a job. I would drive around and look for help wanted signs. Go in and fill out an application and get hired on the spot. Mind you these were not careers but decent enough jobs. In 1998 I was making $12 an hour and doing just fine. I had a 1 bedroom apartment I paid $325 a month for. Had a car I paid 2 grand for. Gas was cheap. Food was cheap. I wasn't crushing it but I was fine.

After working a few jobs I settled into working at a foundry and then the anxiety started. I didn't go to college and didn't have a lot of qualifications. The foundry paid well but not great. Well enough that I really couldn't get a better paying job elsewhere and they took advantage. Bad conditions. Safety issues. It was never really just a steady thing. It was constant mandatory OT then a small time of 40 hours then layoffs. Then back to work. It was rough. By then I was married and had a kid and just had to deal with it.

The anxiety seems different these days with AI and private equity firms and billionaires taking over the world or trying to. I am medically retired now So I don't have the work anxiety but I have the anxiety of my wife could be pushed out of her job at any moment. The anxiety of not having health insurance even though my health is failing. The anxiety of renting a shitty house that the landlord does not maintain but charges us enough that we have to stay cause it is as cheap as we will get.

So I fell you. Same but different.

I think I can honestly say the only time I didn't have a lot of anxiety was maybe from 1995 to 2005 or so.